Another clip from the 1996 video interview with Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay in which he describes the absence of language to describes gays in the 1930s. The word "homosexual" wasn't even in the dictionary until about 1939, so he recounts how men in the community back then would refer to each other as "that way" or on a good day as "temperamental."


This movie is part of the collection: Shaping San Francisco

Producer: Shaping San Francisco
Audio/Visual: sound
Keywords: gay; gay identity; homosexual; 1930s; sociology; language; self-reference

Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0

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